Attending Oxford: Doctor Thorne!
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The Oxford University Press, centuries old and the biggest academic press in the world, founded its World’s Classics series in 1906 (having bought the imprimatur lock, stock, and barrel from the brilliant publisher Grant Richards in 1901). For over a hundred years, the line has produced reasonably-priced and expertly-edited canonical texts, proving that great and challenging books never go out of fashion and paving the path for later imitators like the Modern Library and Penguin Classics. New or old, it’s always a pleasure to celebrate Oxford World’s Classics here at Stevereads.
Although I’m surely the last person in the entire Republic of Letters to learn the news, I was nevertheless overjoyed to find out a few days ago that lionized “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes is writing a new British TV series adaptation of Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope. I wasn’t overjoyed because of “Downton Abbey,” which I usually found too campy and derivative to enjoy unselfconsciously for more than about ten minutes at a stretch. No, rather I was overjoyed because the show made Fellowes what passes for a star in TV-writing circles, and that star power virtually guarantees that this upcoming “Doctor Thorne” series will be a success.
And that’s joyful news because anything that brings the novels of Anthony Trollope to the wider attention of the reading public is to be cheered from the rooftops.
Doctor Thorne appeared in 1858; it was his seventh novel, the third of his “Barchester” series, and at the end of his life, Trollope thought it might well have been the most popular novel he ever wrote – an astonishing opinion coming from the author of The Way We Live Now, He Knew He Was Right, The Last Chronicle of Barset, and of course Barchester Towers.
The novel certainly was popular, and more than any of the books that preceded it, Doctor Thorne solidified Trollope’s place in the Victorian pantheon of popular authors. After Doctor Thorne, Trollope felt confident asking for higher and higher payments from publishers; reading its volumes, the circulating-library public knew at last that here was a writer it could embrace.
The story here, famously suggested to Trollope by his brother, concerns the title character, Doctor Thorne of Greshambury, a kind and virtuous man who comes across as so close to being a paragon that Trollope himself, in an early chapter, feels compelled to assure us he’s not perfect:
No man plumed himself on good blood more than Dr. Thorne; no man had greater pride in his genealogical tree, and his hundred and thirty clearly proved descents from MacAdam; no man had a stronger theory as to the advantage held by men who have grandfathers over those who have none, or have none worth talking about. Let it not be thought that our doctor was a perfect character. No, indeed; most far from perfect. He had within him an inner, stubborn, self-admiring pride, which made him believe himself to be better and higher than those around him, and this from some unknown cause which he could hardly explain to himself.
Doctor Thorne has taken in his niece Mary, the illegitimate daughter of his brother Henry, after Henry was clubbed to death by a drunk and enraged man named Roger Scatcherd (Henry 
doesn’t suspect he’s enraged Scatcherd; when he sees the man coming, his final words are the hilariously blithe “Well, Roger, what’s in the wind?”). The murderer had been wronged by Henry Thorne, so his prison sentence was very short – after which he succeeded in making himself a very wealthy stonemason … and a hardened alcoholic.
Meanwhile, the young hero of the story, Frank Gresham, is old enough to marry. His impoverished family, spearheaded by his imperious mother, Lady Arabella, insist that he must marry an heiress in order to save the family finances, even though Frank is in love with penniless Mary and she with him. Mary, a wearisome salt-lick of vanilla virtue, refuses to let Frank ruin his family and besmirch his station by marrying her, and he briefly flirts with the idea of pitching woo to the rich commercial heiress Martha Dunstable.
Trollope invests Miss Dunstable with roughly five times the character and energy possessed by either Frank or Mary. She instantly sees right through Frank’s fumbling romantic overtures and upbraids him – warmly but firmly:
“Sell yourself for money! Why, I I were a man I would not sell one jot of liberty for mountains of gold. What! Tie myself in the heyday of my youth to a person I could never love, for a price! Perjure myself, destroy myself – and not only myself, but her also, in order that I might live idly! Oh, heavens! Mr. Gresham! Can it be tha the words of such a woman as your aunt have sunk so deeply in your heart; have blackened you so foully as to make you think of such vile folly as this? Have you forgotten your soul, your spirit, your man’s energy, the treasure of your heart? And you, so young! For shame, Mr. Gresham! For shame – for shame!”
Readers of Doctor Thorne know perfectly well that Trollope will bring Frank and Mary together in a way that isn’t penniless, and both Doctor Thorne and the reader know exactly what that way will be. It’s altogether remarkable how skillfully Trollope manages to maintain narrative tension despite having very early on simply told his readers what’s what and given them a strong wink about how things will turn out (indeed, the whole reason Trollope is able to make Lord Porlock such an exquisitely comic creation is because both he and we know Lord Porlock won’t be sticking around to get in the way of Mary’s happy destiny)(on the one in a million chance there are Stevereads readers who haven’t yet read the book, I’m trying here to not ruin any little plot-twists – which feels like a fairly ridiculous thing to worry about, 150 years after the fact, but still …).
I don’t see how Fellowes and the TV show’s directors can do likewise, to be honest. It seems to
me they’ll have to resort to just the kinds of Victorian-style melodrama – red herrings, climatic reveals, and the whole rest of the Dickens grab-bag – Trollope pointedly avoids in this novel. That’ll be disappointing if it happens, and likewise disappointing is the decision to cast the young and beautiful Alison Brie as Miss Dunstable, when the whole point of the character is that she’s older than Frank Gresham and not beautiful – and that she knows it and is far too grounded to feel insecure about it. Making her young and beautiful removes the mercenary absurdity of the task Frank Gresham’s relatives have set for him.
But a different bit of casting is absolutely perfect: the great Ian McShane as Frank Scatcherd! McShane will of course be immortal for his portrayal of Al Swearengen in HBO’s “Deadwood,” and in Frank Scatcherd he has a very similar role to sink his teeth into: 
another violent, wounded alcoholic commoner. It should be a pure treat to watch.
(And the casting of Harry Richardson as Frank Gresham is also cheering news, since he’s a very, um, promising young thespian …)
The best part, though, better than any casting? The chance that even a portion of “Downton Abbey”s vast and loyal viewership will migrate over to the world of Trollope’s Barsetshire. Once they’ve walked its pretty lanes and visited its stately homes and taken sides in its various social and ecclesiastical squabbles, I predict each and every one of them will decide to stay.